Series/Report no.
Global Feminisms Russia Site Interview
Description
The Global Feminisms Project (https://globalfeminisms.umich.edu/) is a collaborative international oral history project that examines the history of feminist activism, women's movements, and academic women's studies in sites around the world. The current archive includes interviews with women's movement activists and women's studies scholars in China, India, Nicaragua, Poland, and the United States. We are currently working on adding interviews from Brazil and Russia. The Project is based in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at UM, which is also the home for the U.S. site research team. Our international collaborators include: - Laboratório de História Oral e Imagem - UFF (the Laboratory of Oral History and Images at the Federal Fluminense University in Rio de Janeiro) and Núcleo de História, Memória e Documento - NUMEM (the Center for History, Memory, and Documentation at the Federal State University in Rio de Janeiro), BRAZIL - China Women's University in Beijing, CHINA - SPARROW, Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women in Mumbai, INDIA - Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres de Nicaragua (Autonomous Women's Movement), NICARAGUA - Fundacja Kobiet eFKa (Women's Foundation eFKa) in Krakow, POLAND
Abstract
Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova, also referred to as Elena Rostislavovna" throughout this interview, was born in 1963, holds a Masters in Social Work and is a Doctor of Sociology. She is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Social Policy Studies and Leading Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Policy at the same university. She was previously Chair of the Department of Sociology, Social Anthropology, and Social Work at Saratov State Technical University and advisor and co-founder of the non-governmental research organization Center for Social Policy and Gender Studies. Her research interests include social policy, sociology of professions, gender and disability, family and children, as well as visual and qualitative research methods. She teaches courses on the sociology of the public sphere, visual anthropology, qualitative research methods, social policy, gender studies, and social work. Her main publications in Russian include: Socio Cultural Analysis of Otherness (Saratov 1997), Social Citizenship of People with Disabilities in Russia (co-authored with Pavel Romanov, Saratov 2005), and in English: Gender and Class in Russian Welfare Policy: Soviet Legacies and Contemporary Challenges (Goteborg University 2011), Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: History, policy and everyday life (co-edited with Michael Rasell, Routledge 2014).